Blizzard drops support for World of Warcraft, Diablo III on Windows XP and Vista

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If you are a fan of Blizzard games and are still clinging to Windows XP or Vista, now might be the right time to seriously consider an upgrade: The video game developer is joining a growing number of companies no longer supporting both operating systems.

Blizzard announced in a forum thread that World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm won’t work on those legacy platforms before the end of the year. The game developer said:

Starting later this year, we will begin the process of ending support for Windows XP and Windows Vista in World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm. Microsoft ceased mainstream support for these versions of Windows in 2009 and 2012, respectively, but since a decent portion of our audience was still using them at the time, we continued supporting them. However, there have been three major Windows releases since Vista, and at this point, the vast majority of our audience has upgraded to one of the newer versions.

After these older operating systems are no longer supported, the games will not run on them, so we encourage any players who are still using one of the older OSes to upgrade to a newer version. We’ll be rolling out this change on a staggered schedule, and will post further notices as we get closer to making the change for each game.

In 2016, Blizzard announced that it would drop support for both Windows XP and Vista after years of patronizing both. However, the time frame was not clear. Blizzard games have remained available for players for many, many operating system cycles. But since many gamers have migrated to modern platforms, Blizzard finally decided to pull the plug on some games still supporting those older operating systems.

Reports suggest that this process would be on a case-by-case basis rather than be executed all at once. The ending of support for those games makes sense considering that Microsoft itself no longer supports XP for consumers.

Hopefully, players must make the switch and be able to continue playing Blizzard’s games. Does Blizzard’s decision to ditch Windows XP and Vista surprise you? Let us know!